Reeducation Camps? PC Police at UC Berkeley want to ban one of the most American phrases of all time

June 23, 2015

WRITER

Remember how everyone referred to America as a “melting pot” in school? Well, that’s about to change in UC Berkeley. The school — for some INSANE reason — thinks the term is offensive and administrators want it out of the curriculums. Glenn’s been warning for a long time that universities are turning into reeducation camps that brainwash students to only think certain thoughts, and this may be the craziest example yet. Glenn had the story and reaction Tuesday morning on radio.

The Daily Beast reports:

Fifty years after the birth of the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, officials across the UC system are encouraging faculty and students to purge mundane, potentially offensive words and phrases from their vocabularies.

Administrators want members of campus to avoid the use of racist and sexist statements, though their notions about what kinds of statements qualify are completely bonkers. “America is a melting pot,” “Why are you so quiet?” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” are all phrases that should raise red flags, according to the UC speech police.

Get Glenn's reaction below, and scroll down for a transcript.

Below is a rush transcription, it may contain errors:

Glenn: First you ban words. Now you're banning phrases.

It's not unlikely that the next step is to ban books. I mean, how could you not ban books? If you're saying that the person -- America is the land of opportunity, a book that says that must be banned. One that makes that case.

If you're saying that America is a melting pot, you've got to ban the books that originated that. How could you possibly have a book in the library that explains why affirmative action is racist? That's a racist microaggression by default.

It's not far down the road before books are banned by universities.

PAT: It's interest too because the people -- a lot of the same people who banned words in the past, like the N-word, which has absolutely been banned for white people.

GLENN: Not the president.

STU: It's -- it's the people who banned it that can say it. It's really fascinating to me that that's perfectly acceptable and he used it like you said earlier, without hesitation.

GLENN: With no hesitation.

PAT: He just went right to it. And I don't know how you can do that when you've been preaching all along about racism and offensive words.

GLENN: Because the first thing you have to do is you have to set up -- like Animal Farm. All animals are equal, some are just more equal than others.

PAT: Yeah, that's where we are.

GLENN: You have to set up who is running the show. And who is running the show is definitely not God. God -- all rights do not come from God; they come from the government. And so they will tell you what you can and cannot do. They will make the rules.

You can't expect to understand them. They're arbitrary.

Because they're making them.

STU: Haven't we as a country done a pretty good job at sorting these out ourselves?

GLENN: No, because a lot of places, the most qualified person gets the job.

STU: I know. But this is why this is ridiculous. Like, we have a First Amendment in this country. And you look back at history, we are less than 100 years from a time where a -- a president that is completely celebrated today by the same people who want to make these bans in banning flags and banning words, those same people celebrate Woodrow Wilson, the guy who brought the KKK back. We're less than 100 years from that. We didn't ban people saying the KKK. We didn't end their organization. We didn't stop their publications from being available. They just suck so bad, the United States decided, get away. What a great country.

We don't have to ban these horrible ideas. You know, they get pushed back into the dustbin of history through what we see as a free speech market. It actually works. I mean, you see in Germany where they have -- they've gone and you can't do -- the guy wearing the Nazi armband on the train we were talking about yesterday, where was it? Seattle. That can't happen in Germany. You go to prison for that in Germany. Obviously you can do that. But the organic way to make these things go away for good and to be really tossed into the dustbin of history is to let people come to their own conclusions that those ideas are wrong. They're horribly, horribly wrong. And I think that's -- we've done a pretty good job of that in this country. We've come a long way.

GLENN: Yeah. Okay.

STU: I mean, I'm not going to say melting pot on the air. Oh, no. I did it.

GLENN: Wow. America's land of opportunity, Stu.

STU: Yes, I like it. I know it's unpopular to say, but I like it.

PAT: I suppose you feel the most qualified person should get the job.

STU: Yes. That's why I don't understand the whole Jeffy thing.

GLENN: Gee, Pat, why are you so quiet?

PAT: Are you saying I should assimilate into the dominant culture?

GLENN: I have to tell you something, I know we've joked for a long, long time, about, you know, Glenn always says, oh, yeah, Glenn, you know, he takes anything, and it always ends with a bullet in the head. This ends with a bullet in the head.

PAT: It does. I agree with that. I agree with that.

GLENN: This ends with a bullet in the head because the next step. They started with words. They're now doing phrases because the phrases are ideas. We're not talking about words anymore. We're talking about ideas.

The most qualified gets the job is not a string of words. It's an idea. So you have to squash the idea. If you can't squash the idea, you must put a bullet in somebody's head. What happens? Play Bill Ayers again. Play Bill Ayers again. Listen to this. This is the FBI informant that studied the Weather Underground in the 1970s. This is him when it became unclassified. This is what he said

VOICE: I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government? You know, we -- we become responsible then for administrating, you know, 250 million people.

And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans and the north Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the southwest.

We would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't reeducate? They're die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated.

GLENN: Okay. Stop. There you go. There you go. They're going to have to set up a reeducation camp. I contend that's the University of California Berkeley. That's a reeducation camp, gang. You're going there. You're sending your kid there, and they're telling them, there are ideas they must not think. Who puts their kid in a college where they say, you must not think those things? I want to go to a college that challenges my children. Pushes their buttons. Make sure they know what they really believe and what they stand for. Say the most outrageous thing to get them to think.

They're telling them, you shall not think. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. Nobody with good intent does that. I don't want my kids going to a church. I won't go to a church that says, you won't think these things. You won't read won't things. You won't talk about these things. No, no, no. Nobody says that to me!

I read what I want. If I want to read something that is -- is challenging to my faith, I will read that. Because I'm smart enough to figure it out.

They're telling your children not to think. That ideas are dangerous. Ideas change the world.

That ideas of merit are dangerous. Merit changes the world. Merit is the reason we have stopped disease. Merit is the reason we feed as many millions of people as we feed because of merit. Somebody did something. Somebody said, I can fix that. And they did.

So what happens? First you have the reeducation camp. There are those that will not go. The reeducation camp teaches you how to think.

They must ban certain thoughts. Once that ban doesn't go far enough, then they have to ban the thoughts and the books that those thoughts are contained in. Those books that further that thought. They must discredit those authors. They must discredit anybody who stands up for that. Who has a different point of view. Shout them down! Shout them down! Beat them in the streets. Call them racists. Call them haters. Do whatever you have to do. But get them to shut up.

If you can't scare them into silence, you beat them into silence.

And if you can't beat them into silence, you just kill a few of them and everybody else shuts up. That's the way it works. That's the way it has worked every time in human history. What, we're unique somehow or another? It doesn't end this way somehow or another? Tell me what makes us different than the Nazis when they banned thoughts. Tell me the difference. When you have comedians who have always gone to the universities -- why? Because they're open-minded. That's where you go and you try new thoughts, new things. You try to it on the youth. These -- the youth today are being taught, close your mind. Shut your mind down. Don't think different things. Think exactly what we tell you. When comedians will no longer go to college campuses because they're sheep. Because they're foolish. Because they're politically correct. You've -- you don't have revolutionaries. You have lemmings. You have useful idiots.

When will our children wake up? When will our college students wake up? They're telling you to ban ideas.

If you would have learned anything in history, you would have known, that is the act of a fascist dictator. I'm called a fascist. I say, read anything. More importantly, read what they tell you not to read.

Twitter mob goes ballistic over Father's Day photo of Caitlyn Jenner. Who cares?

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Here's a question unique to our times: "Should I tell my father 'Happy Father's Day,' even though he (she?) is now one of my mothers?"

Father's Day was four days ago, yes, but this story is just weird enough to report on. One enjoyable line to read was this gem from Hollywood Gossip: "Cait is a woman and a transgender icon, but she is also and will always be the father of her six children."

Imagine reading that to someone ten — even five — years ago. And, honestly, there's something nice about it. But the strangeness of its having ever been written overpowers any emotional impact it might bring.

"So lucky to have you," wrote Kylie Jenner, in the Instagram caption under pre-transition pictures of Bruce Jenner.

Look. I risk sounding like a tabloid by mere dint of having even mentioned this story, but the important element is the cultural sway that's occurring. The original story was that a band of disgruntled Twitter users got outraged about the supposed "transphobic" remarks by Jenner's daughter.

But, what we should be saying is, "who the hell cares?" Who cares what one Jenner says to another — and more importantly and on a far deeper level — who cares what some anonymous Twitter user has to say?

When are we going to stop playing into the hands of the Twitter mob?

When are we going to stop playing into the hands of the Twitter mob? Because, at the moment, they've got it pretty good. They have a nifty relationship with the mainstream media: One or two Twitter users get outraged by any given thing — in this case Jenner and supposed transphobia. In return, the mainstream media use the Twitter comment as a source.

Then, a larger Twitter audience points to the article itself as proof that there's some kind of systemic justice at play. It's a closed-market currency, where the negative feedback loop of proof and evidence is composed of faulty accusations. Isn't it a hell of a time to be alive?

These 5 governors are refusing to send national guard troops to the border

CAITLIN O'HARA/AFP/Getty Images

These days, when Americans decide to be outraged about something, we really go all out.

This week's outrage is, of course, the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy toward illegal immigration along the southern border. Specifically, people are upset over the part of the policy that separates children from their parents when the parents get arrested.

Lost in all the outrage is that the President is being proactive about border security and is simply enforcing the law. Yes, we need to figure out a less clumsy, more compassionate way of enforcing the law, but children are not being flung into dungeons and fed maggots as the media would have you believe.

But having calm, reasonable debates about these things isn't the way it's done anymore. You have to make strong, sweeping announcements so the world knows how righteous your indignation is.

That's why yesterday, the governors of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut declared they are withholding or recalling their National Guard troops from the U.S.-Mexico border until this policy of separating children from their parents is rescinded.

Adding to the media stunt nature of this entire "crisis," it turns out this defiant announcement from these five governors is mostly symbolic. Because two months ago, when President Trump called for 4,000 additional National Guard troops to help patrol the border, large numbers of troops were not requested from those five states. In fact, no troops were requested at all from Rhode Island. But that didn't stop Rhode Island's Democratic governor, Gina Raimondo, from announcing she would refuse to send troops if she were asked. She called the family separation policy, "immoral, unjust and un-American."

There's so much outrage, we're running short on adjectives.

The governors of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York all used the word "inhumane" in their statements condemning the Trump administration policy. There's so much outrage, we're running short on adjectives.

In a totally unrelated coincidence, four of these five governors are running for re-election this year.

I've made my position clear — separating these children from their parents is a bad policy and we need to stop. We need to treat these immigrants with the kind of compassion we'd want for our own children. And I said the same thing in 2014 when no one cared about the border crisis.

If consistency could replace even just a sliver of the outrage in America, we would all be a lot better off.

Where were Rachel Maddow's tears for immigrant children in 2014?

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

I think we can all agree, both on the Left and the Right, that children who have been caught up in illegal immigration is an awful situation. But apparently what no one can agree on is when it matters to them. This past weekend, it suddenly — and even a little magically — began to matter to the Left. Seemingly out of nowhere, they all collectively realized this was a problem and all rushed to blame the Trump administration.

Here's Rachel Maddow yesterday:

Rachel Maddow chokes up and cries on air as she struggles to deliver news that migrant babies and toddlers have been sent to "tender age" shelters pic.twitter.com/O6crm8cvyR
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) June 20, 2018

I seem to remember getting mocked by the Left for showing emotion on TV, but I'll give her a pass here. This is an emotional situation. But this is what I can't give her a pass on: where the heck was this outrage and emotion back in 2014? Because the same situation going on today — that stuff Maddow and the rest of the Left have only just now woken up to — was going on back in July 2014! And it was arguably worse back then.

I practically begged and pleaded for people to wake up to what was going on. We had to shed light on how our immigration system was being manipulated by people breaking our laws, and they were using kids as pawns to get it done. But unlike the gusto the Left is using now to report this story, let's take a look at what Rachel Maddow thought was more important back in 2014.

On July 1, 2014, Maddow opened her show with a riveting monologue on how President Obama was hosting a World Cup viewing party. That's hard-hitting stuff right there.

On July 2, 2014, Maddow actually acknowledged kids were at the border, but she referenced Health and Human Services only briefly and completely rushed through what was actually happening to these kids. She made a vague statement about a "policy" stating where kids were being taken after their arrival. She also blamed Congress for not acting.

See any difference in reporting there from today? That "policy" she referenced has suddenly become Trump's "new" policy, and it isn't Congress's fault… it's all on the President.

She goes on throughout the week.

On July 7, 2014, her top story was something on the Koch brothers. Immigration was only briefly mentioned at the end of the show. This trend continued all the way through the week. I went to the border on July 19. Did she cover it? Nope. In fact, she didn't mention kids at the border for the rest of the month. NOT AT ALL.

Do you care about immigrant kids who have been caught in the middle of a broken immigration system or not?

Make up your minds. Is this an important issue or not? Do you care about immigrant kids who have been caught in the middle of a broken immigration system or not? Do you even care to fix it, or is this what it looks like — just another phony, addicted-to-outrage political stunt?

UPDATE: Here's how this discussion went on radio. Watch the video below.

Glenn gives Rachel Maddow the benefit of the doubt

Rachel Maddow broke down in tears live on her MSNBC show over border crisis.

Obama's tribute center in Chicago will cost taxpayers $200 million

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Progressives think the Obamas are a gift to the world. But their gift is apparently more of the metaphorical kind. It doesn't extend to helpful, tangible things like saving taxpayers money. Illinois has approved $224 million to pay for street and transportation upgrades around the planned site of the Obama Presidential Center. The catch is that Illinois taxpayers will have to cover $200 million of that cost. For a presidential museum.

Eight years of multiplying the national debt wasn't enough for Barack Obama. Old fleecing habits die hard. What's another $200 million here and there, especially for something as important as an Obama tribute center?

That's all well and good except Illinois can't even fund its pension system. The state has a $137 billion funding shortfall. That means every person in Illinois owes $11,000 for pensions, and there is no plan to fix the mess. Unless Illinois progressives have discovered a new kind of math, this doesn't really add up. You can't fund pensions, but you're going to figure out a way to milk the public for another $200 million to help cover the cost of a library?

It's hard to imagine who in their right mind would think this will be money well spent. Well, except for maybe Chicago Mayor and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who said, "The state's… investment in infrastructure improvements near the Obama Center on the South Side of Chicago is money well spent."

Some presidential overreach lasts longer than others.

The spending has already been signed into law, even though the Obama library has not received construction approval yet. Part of the holdup is that the proposed site is on public land in historic Jackson Park. That doesn't seem very progressive of the Obamas, but, you know, for certain presidents, you go above and beyond. It's just what you do. Some presidential overreach lasts longer than others.

Here's the thing about taxing the peasants so the king can build a fancy monument to himself – it's wrong. And completely unnecessary. The Obamas have the richest friends on the planet who could fund this project in their sleep. If the world simply must have a tricked-out Obama museum, then let private citizens take out their wallets voluntarily.

As the Mercury Museum proved this weekend, it is possible to build an exhibit with amazing artifacts that attracts a ton of visitors – and it cost taxpayers approximately zero dollars.

Glenn's Show Prep